wheel n.
[from slang `big wheel' for a powerful person] A person who
has an active wheel bit. "We
need to find a wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives." (See wedged, sense 1.) The traditional name of
security group zero in BSD (to which
the major system-internal users like root belong) is `wheel'. Some vendors have
expanded on this usage, modifying Unix so that only members of
group `wheel' can go root.
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wheel bit n.
A privilege bit that allows the possessor to perform some
restricted operation on a timesharing system, such as read or
write any file on the system regardless of protections, change or
look at any address in the running monitor, crash or reload the
system, and kill or create jobs and user accounts. The term was
invented on the TENEX operating system, and carried over to
TOPS-20, XEROX-IFS, and others. The state of being in a
privileged logon is sometimes called `wheel mode'. This term
entered the Unix culture from TWENEX in the mid-1980s and has
been gaining popularity there (esp. at university sites). See
also root.
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wheel of reincarnation
[coined in a paper by T. H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland "On the
Design of Display Processors", Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June
1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function
in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose
peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward
more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices
that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in
the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU,
at which point the cycle begins again.
Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in
graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in
communications and floating-point processors. Also known as `the
Wheel of Life', `the Wheel of Samsara', and other variations of
the basic Hindu/Buddhist theological idea. See also blitter, bit
bang.
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wheel wars n.
[Stanford University] A period in larval stage during which student
hackers hassle each other by attempting to log each other out of
the system, delete each other's files, and otherwise wreak havoc,
usually at the expense of the lesser users.